one former employee in the Kochs’ political operation admitted to Politico a month before Trump was elected. “We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots army that was not controllable.” In other ways too, the Kochs and their allied big donors became victims of their own success in 2016. They inadvertently laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise by too thoroughly capturing the Republican Party with their cash. Their narrowly self-serving policy priorities were at odds with those of the vast majority of voters.
